Smart devices are big business. Engineers and inventors are always striving to create interesting products to meet the changing demands of the market. Today, almost all electronic products can be made intelligent enough to connect to each other and connect to the Internet, creating a wide range of possibilities to serve their owners.
As a channel for modern devices to interact with people and receive commands, apps are more successful than the devices themselves. Apps allow smartphone users to use their handheld devices for work, play, and everything in between. Businesses can easily promote and sell their products using the app. Drivers can navigate with the car’s smart navigation system, collect hours, and track heart rate and calories. Report health-related data such as energy to the owner.
But the ongoing app boom has raised serious concerns in the tech community. Smart devices greatly improve our quality of life, but they also widen the playing field for cybercriminals. For example, mobile phones are a great tool for many people to browse the web, communicate with friends, and shop. If a hacker can break into one of the many apps running on a smartphone, they can control its owner’s address, contact and banking information, as well as other devices connected to the phone, such as computers and home security camera.
Therefore, it is important that all corporate applications follow the correct policies to ensure the highest security at all times. The following tips will help keep your application safe.
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OWASP Top 10 Certified Documents
If you’re unfamiliar with the OWASP Top Ten, it’s a definitive collection of application-critical security risks identified and agreed upon by project experts around the world. This article addresses various privacy and integrity issues such as injection attacks, authentication and session management, data leakage, and security misconfigurations.
OWASP (Open Web Application Security Project) is an organization that provides unbiased, actionable information about computer and Internet applications as a guide for all software developers to address common security threats. We encourage you to use this document. Knowing this increases the chances of your application not being hacked.
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Encryption
Encryption is one of the most effective security measures you can use to protect your applications. Algorithmically converts a simple string of data into unreadable jumbled code that can only be deciphered using a cryptographic key.
HTTPS is the first choice for encrypting your application. Designed to provide secure communication over computer networks and the Internet, HTTPS implements Transport Layer Security (TLS), a cryptographic protocol that ensures data integrity and privacy between apps and servers. Therefore, unlike insecure HTTP, HTTPS does not allow attackers to intercept and modify the data flow.
Encryption of data at rest is also important. While HTTPS reduces the risk of man-in-the-middle (MITM) attacks, other methods of directly attacking servers and applications can be disastrous. Therefore, encrypt all data, including application code, using encryption methods such as AES 256-bit encryption or SHA-256.
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Proper cutting
Defects are not discovered until these applications are complete and working, but they may not be serious enough to warrant immediate attention. However, undetected or unnoticed vulnerabilities can be a potential opportunity for hackers who may not fix the situation until it is too late.
A robust logging infrastructure can provide immediate notification when a breach occurs, so you can quickly identify problematic bugs and those that were occurring around the time of the attack, and deal with issues quickly.
To implement better logging, first instrument your application. Depending on the programming language, you can use one of the many tools and services available to developers, such as Blackfire, NewRelic, and Tideways. Then develop a high-speed scanning solution that will quickly and efficiently collect error information as it arrives. Linux Syslog Stack, ELK, and PaperTrail are useful utilities that come in handy.
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Real-time security monitoring
A strategy to ensure a high level of application security is incomplete without a firewall. The firewall is an essential line of defense against breaches. In particular, a web application firewall or WAF is designed for HTTP/S-based applications to protect servers from common attacks such as cross-site scripting (XSS) and SQL injection. A WAF can view traffic as a story, so you can tailor it to your application’s needs.
However, WAFs have some drawbacks, including the inability to correlate current packets with previous or future received packets. Therefore, firewall activity cannot be used to detect multiple attack attempts.
For full real-time monitoring, consider adding your firewall to a runtime application self-protection (RASP) solution. RASP resides in an application runtime environment, such as Ruby, JVM, or .NET. So close enough to monitor huge amounts of information about events happening.
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Application security audit
New developers are very security conscious when they build apps for the first time. However, as experience accumulates, confidence in his abilities develops, preventing unreasonable self-criticism.
If you have been in the development game for a while, you may not notice any flaws when analyzing your work. In the meantime, a professional security auditor can look at your application from an independent perspective and identify flaws you may not have noticed. Often, auditors are also aware of current security issues and know what to look for, from the obvious to the hidden. This can greatly speed up application development.
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Updating
New vulnerabilities emerge all the time. This means that the operating systems, server packages, application frameworks and libraries you use today may not be secure tomorrow. Well-used support equipment is often modified and configured to stay ahead of new threats. Always make sure you are using the latest stable release available.
Depending on your preferences, you can choose to automate updates or review and approve them manually. Most development packages and languages have update managers that make it relatively easy to keep them up to date.
Outlook
Smart devices and apps are becoming an integral part of our daily lives. However, as use cases evolve, so do security concerns. Application developers should strive to deploy applications that meet users’ security expectations. While security doesn’t end with these 8 methods, they are a good starting point in your journey to building/deploying secure applications.
